• As I See It: Insult to Injury

  September 29, 2008 Victor Rozek

  After the Fed bailed out AIG with 85 taxpayer billions, William Greider said something that caught my attention the way a near-death experience does. Greider is no blowhard. He is a serious journalist with a deep understanding of the backroom workings of the economy. Among other things, he’s written a weighty volume about the inner-working of the Fed called Secrets of the Temple. He knows of what he speaks. In the aftermath of the AIG bailout Greider wrote: “For the first time in this unfolding financial crisis, I felt personally scared by the news. Not about my money, but

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• BCD Adds New Partners in Europe and California

  September 29, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Business Computer Design Int’l has added a trio of new partners to its reseller program, including Deltacare of The Netherlands, Dagessa of Poland, and evolveIT of Irvine, California. All three new partners will be selling the array of BCD’s application modernization and transformation products for the IBM i operating system. BCD markets a collection of integrated i OS solutions, which includes the WebSmart PHP and ILE development environments, the Presto screen modernization tool, the Nexus Web portal, the Catapult spool file delivery system, and the Clover reporting and query tool. BCD sells its solutions through a business partner program, which

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• Help Desk Follies: We All Ask Stupid Questions, Right?

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The economic woes in the financial services and housing markets are putting a pretty significant damper on life inside the data center and out, and taking a break from the seriousness that we are all facing thanks to the global nature of the economy is more important than usual. It is in that spirit that we report on an utterly silly survey of chief information officers by IT headhunter Robert Half Technology, which asked the CIOs what were the weirdest questions that their help desks have fielded. We have all heard the one about the end user who mistook

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• RISC and Itanium Server Makers Do Well in Europe, Says IDC

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sales and shipments of servers in the European, African, and Middle Eastern region of the world grew faster than the global average in the second quarter of the year, according to statistics released by IDC, pushed upward by sales in Central and Eastern Europe and providing economic sanctuary for U.S.-based server makers. Server revenues in Q2 rose by 8.7 billion to $4.5 billion, and shipments rose by 12.4 percent to nearly 700,000 units. According to IDC, x64 machinery accounted for 95.5 percent of total server shipments in the quarter throughout the EMEA region, a statistic that has been pretty

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• HP and Oracle Launch Database Machine, and So Can IBM with i

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes, I think of myself simply as a journalist and analyst, reporting on what is happening or what will happen soon in the IT racket. Sometimes, I feel a bit like the Greek chorus in a comedy or tragedy in the ancient world. And so it was last week as I watched Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announce a co-developed data warehouse appliance called the Database Machine at Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco. The HP-Oracle machine is based on HP’s ProLiant DL360 G5 servers–five of them in a rack, to be specific, each with two sockets and using four-core Xeon processors

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• Ocean Computer Group Builds Portfolio with VAI’s ERP Suite

  September 29, 2008 Dan Burger

  Ocean Computer Group, a solutions provider of equipment, APC power, software, consulting, and services for mid-market computer customers throughout the metropolitan New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia areas has added VAI‘s S2K enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite to its product line. This announcement comes a week after VAI launched S2K 5.0, a new version of its flagship IBM i OS-based ERP system for manufacturing, distribution, retail, metals, food and related service industries. The release includes many new features, including a new Java client, an updated warehouse management system (WMS), new Web portal programs, and a new iPhone interface.

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• Don’t Sell IBM Short–And Uncle Sam Means It

  September 29, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So much for your grand plan to make your retirement nest egg in one fell swoop by selling shares in IBM short. Last week, the list of companies in which short-selling is no longer allowed swelled, and now includes Big Blue. Two weeks ago, when the U.S. economy was led to the window ledge, the Securities and Exchange Commission created a list of 800 financial services, insurance, and related companies in which short-selling would be prohibited. (Let’s face it, short-selling has created some of the mess that we are in, and these days, shorting financial stocks is like fishing in

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• The Uberating System

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A good question, posed by English poet Robert Browning. I don’t know if the data center can qualify as a kind of heaven, though I do suspect that if there is a heaven, the temperature is always perfect, and I can imagine the faint humming of the workings of the Universe being audible. Anyway, you can’t blame IT vendors for having their reach exceed their grasp, which happens all the time. This is, apparently, how progress is made–through stretching. Sometimes the truth, sometimes our minds. Sometimes

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• IBM Cuts Deals on CPU and i5/OS for 550, 570, and 595 Boxes

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We’re almost into the fourth quarter and just finishing up the last couple of business days in the third quarter, and that means IBM is looking to cut some deals on CPU cores and i5/OS licenses to make some dough out of the System i installed base. Let’s cover the hardware deals first. Last week, IBM announced a promotion that will run until December 31 that gives shops with System i 550, 570, and 595 servers rebates on processor activations on Power5 and Power5+ processors that are already inside their boxes and in a latent state. (IBM calls this capacity

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• Need to Cut Costs? Midrange Shops Should Do ERP Well

  September 22, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a toughening economic environment, which many companies and individuals are facing these days in the Western economies, there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the stress. One of them is to look around to try to cut personnel, to streamline processes to try to cut costs for manufacturing or distribution of a product, or to argue harder for discounts from suppliers. While IT projects often are the first things to get cut, maybe the smart thing to do is to invest in a better ERP system. Or be grateful for the good one you might be lucky or

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